Friend in the Field

Lately at one of my schools there has been some pretty heavy construction/demolition happening. Today (and for the last few days) there has been near consistent jack-hammering all day. You can hear it everywhere in the school. Annoying. There's a demonstration class happening tomorrow for the elementary school teachers to watch how a junior high school English teacher teaches. I've got to do a whole lot of unnecessary stuff for it but it should go well me thinks.

Onto the topic at hand. Onto the blog that I need to write right now or else it becomes too late to do it. Onto my ramblings of when Brendan came to stay.

(Brendan drinking beer and giving me some cartilage on a stick)

Brendan came up to visit me over the period of Golden week. It's a series of public holidays one after the other it what would appear to be clever and generous of Japan... but look harder! What ends up happening is work-holiday-work-weekend-3daysoff-work-work-weekend. Therefore meaning that a fun romp over the course of a week (thereby living up to it's name) is in actuality chopped up into tiny pieces.

We made the most of it though I think! Brendan arrived on a Saturday and after a party that night involving me getting *highly* emotionally distressed about people purposely destroying my screen doors and we set off for Nikko the next day. Because the weather has been so retarded in Japan this year (snow falling onto the cherry blossoms. Go figure) we were able to see quite a lot of cherry blossoms in Nikko which was nice!

Other than Nikko we went to Disneyland which we thought would be crowded but totally wasn't for some reason! I showed Brendan my town and I also took him to the town I work in, Bato, which was having some kind of pseudo-festival. In Bato we met up with my friend Sam and had some soba at the restaurant he works at. He's from America and is on exchange - the family he's staying with runs a soba restaurant that he works in every now and then. Afterwards we made some pottery famous in the area/prefecture and had some fresh fish and eel from one of Sams old host families whose children I teach.

We went down to Tokyo for a bit and met up with some friends to go to a seaside town called Kamakura. It's a nice place but it was SO busy! Dare I say busier than Disneyland? By the end of that day we were exhausted but after staying in Tokyo for the night we made more of a trip around Tokyo visiting various places and catching up with another friend in Harajuku to go see a shrine together. For the next two days afterwards I had to work so Brendan wisely opted to stay in Tokyo in a pretty ritzy hotel while I slaved away at teaching English to inattentive children unwilling to admit the holiday was over.

He came back to my apartment on Friday night and we had some dinner with some pals and the next day we had to rush (i.e. speed) to Utsunomiya the next day so Brendan could get on his bus and therefore his flight.

(Snow in Nikko)

I actually stole these photo's from Brendan as I didn't really take many pictures. I'll try to take a picture of Brendan's finished toilet-bowl-cup from when we made pottery. Art.

Any Questions?